In recent years, there are increasing opportunities for conducting digital video communications such as videophone communications by use of large-screen televisions. In conducting digital video communications, there are limits on a volume of data communicable per unit time, with a bandwidth of a network set as the upper limit. For this reason, in normal digital video communications, a volume of data to be communicated is reduced by use an algorithm which compresses a frame image of digital video. However, when the volume of data to be communicated is large, the bandwidth of the network may become insufficient even by use of the compression algorithm. This results in occurrence of missing data or the like in received data
As a method for solving the above problem, a method for reducing a data amount is performed on data before compression. For example, there has been disclosed a method in which a frame image is selected from frame images photographed by a camera in accordance with a traffic state and the selected frame image is compressed and outputted to an external device (e.g., PTL 1).
However, simply selecting the frame image in accordance with the traffic state may cause unnatural motion of a subject that is displayed in the external device, which has been problematic.